The N.R.A.’s Challenge to America

In case you missed the news—and I can’t really blame you for tuning it out—the National Rifle Association has gotten itself a new president. He’s a charming tub of a man by the name of Jim Porter, and Monday was officially his first day in his new job. But even before taking over at the N.R.A.’s headquarters, in Fairfax, Virginia, Porter clearly signalled his intentions.

Addressing the N.R.A.’s annual convention in Houston over the weekend, the sixty-four year-old Porter told the assembled firearms enthusiasts, survivalists, and Republican hangers-on that they were engaged in a “culture war” with the President, media élitists, Mayor Bloomberg, and anyone else who questioned the right of God-fearing Americans to arm themselves like members of an infantry battalion without a proper system of background checks on purchases. “This is not a battle about gun rights,” Porter declared at a breakfast meeting. “[You] here in this room are fighters for freedom. We are the protectors.”

Evidently, Porter intends to be more confrontational than his predecessor, David Keene, a soft-spoken veteran of the conservative movement, and perhaps outdo Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s executive vice-president and principal spokesman, who spearheaded the organization’s successful fight against President Obama’s gun-control proposals. In his main speech to the convention, on Saturday, Porter accused Obama, whom he’s previously labelled a “fake President,” of “meeting and plotting with the Who’s Who of the gun-ban movement, scheming to create a gun-ban bureaucracy.” And he went on:

President Barack Obama is AWOL on virtually every critical threat facing this country. He’s AWOL on border security, he’s AWOL on the deficit, he’s AWOL on national defense, he’s AWOL on terrorism. But there’s one issue where Obama is not AWOL—that’s on gun control. But there’s one thing Obama will never understand—you, me, our friends, neighbors, coworkers, colleagues, family, and the larger family of patriots who know that the Second Amendment, the freedom of our Republic, trumps the Chicago political machine and its gun-ban agenda every time.

Even by the standards of an organization that counts Ted Nugent and Glenn Beck among its prominent supporters, Porter is a bit of a ham. Last June, addressing the Wallkill Rod and Gun Club, just up the Hudson from Manhattan, he reminded his audience that the N.R.A. was created in New York State, in 1871, by “some Yankee generals who didn’t like the way my Southern boys had the ability to shoot in what we call the ‘war of northern aggression.’ Now, y’all might call it the Civil War, but we call it the ‘war of northern aggression’ down South.”

As you will have surmised, Porter hails from below the Mason-Dixon line: Birmingham, Alabama, to be precise, where he worked for a local firm of attorneys who specialize in, among other things, defending gun manufacturers against lawsuits. His father, Irvine, led the N.R.A. from 1959 to 1961, when it was principally focussed on organizing and educating hunters and target shooters, and largely kept out of national politics. (In 1968, the N.R.A. supported a gun-control act that introduced a licensing system for dealers.) But Porter, in keeping with the transformation that has overtaken the N.R.A. in the past thirty-five years, portrays the organization’s role in much broader and more paranoid terms. “I am one who still feels very strongly that that is one of our greatest charges that we can have today, is to train the civilian in the use of the standard military firearm, so when they have to fight for their country they’re ready to do it,” he said in Wallkill. “Also, when they’re ready to fight tyranny, they’re ready to do it. Also, when they’re ready to fight tyranny, they have the wherewithal and the weapons to do it.”

If there was ever any suggestion that the massacres in Aurora and Newtown would tilt the N.R.A. in a more moderate direction, the elevation of Porter has quashed it. “With Jim Porter, they’ve gone full crazy,” Josh Horwitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told the Associated Press. But it would a mistake to dismiss Porter as just another gun-toting Confederate nut. A self-styled Johnny Reb he may be, but insignificant he isn’t. In declaring war on the coalition that supported the failed gun-control legislation, he and LaPierre aren’t just sticking it to President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg: they are attacking the concept of representative democracy.

As has been pointed out ad infinitum by me and many others, opinion polls showed overwhelming public support for extending background checks to gun shows and Internet sales, as well as majority support for banning semi-automatic weapons and multi-round magazines. But that didn’t stop the N.R.A. from exercising its power. Now, having demonstrated the way in which a forceful and well-organized lobby group can defy the will of the majority, its leaders are determined to press home their advantage in the 2014 midterms.

How do I know this? In Porter’s speech on Saturday, which you can watch on the organization’s Web site, he laid it all out, with commendable clarity. Noting that gun sales have surged in recent months, he said that President Obama’s push for gun control was motivated by “revenge” and had created “political spontaneous combustion.” He continued:

People are reacting to a series of threats to our liberties. The media calls it fear. That’s not it, that not it. It’s a sense of rational outrage that’s been building for a very long time. It’s not going to diminish. It’s not going to go away….

I hear some Americans say with the last election the country is lost. No. No. An election was lost. There’s another election more important to the Second Amendment right around the corner. With the U.S. Senate and the House up for grabs, we as individual N.R.A. members can direct the massive energy of spontaneous combustion to regain the political high ground. We do that, and Obama can be stopped.

So there you have it. In order to mobilize support, Porter, LaPierre et al. will continue to demonize President Obama in the eyes of gun owners and other inhabitants of Middle America, raising the spectre of a black President trying to disarm the populace. But despite what Porter said, the N.R.A.’s ultimate aim isn’t defeating Obama’s effort to pass some gun-control laws—it’s already done that. The N.R.A.’s real mission going forward is to repeat what it did in the 1994 midterms, and put back the prospects of gun control for another generation.

To anybody who cares about keeping deadly weapons out of the hands of criminals, disturbed post-adolescents, and would-be terrorists of the Tamerlan Tsanaev or Timothy McVeigh variety, and to those who don’t care that much about gun control but who harbor the subversive thought that congressmen and senators should carry out the will of the people, the N.R.A. has issued a direct challenge. The organization is determined to frustrate your wishes, and, to this end, it’s already out there organizing, propagandizing, and agitating. You know it won’t stop—it never does.

Conceptually, the way to meet the challenge is transparent. Fight fire with fire: transform popular support for gun-control measures into a national lobbying force that is just as effective (or, at least, nearly as effective) as the N.R.A. The way Washington works, only when congressmen and senators fear the wrath of the anti-N.R.A. as much as they fear the actual N.R.A. will the country get proper gun laws.

The practical question, which I’ll discuss in a subsequent post, is how to construct such a powerful and intimidating lobby. Already, there are many dedicated and talented people who have devoted their lives to the cause of saner gun laws. But even with a swell of popular outrage following the Newtown massacre, and with an influx of money from Bloomberg and other wealthy donors, their efforts weren’t sufficient to overcome the N.R.A.’s reign of terror on Capitol Hill.

Something has to be done. But the first step is recognizing the scale of the challenge. Thanks to Jim Porter, it has just been spelled out.

Above: Jim Porter (right) and David Keene at the annual meeting of members for the National Rifle Association, in Houston, Texas, on May 4, 2013. Photograph by Adrees Latif/Reuters.